… starring Rich Rogers, Chuck Hedden, Arnold Cassell, and Mick Bradley.

I’m writing about our recent pitch session for a new rpg series that the Canoneers planned to play using Primetime Adventures.

Ah, Primetime Adventures, affectionately known as PTA. ‘A game of television drama’, it says on the cover. I find that to be joyfully true, and thus PTA has become a fun and rather frequent part of my rpg experience over the past few years. Practically any type of premise, any type of fiction, is possible with this game, as long as it can be framed within the general boundaries of a TV series. You could play a high-school monster hunters series, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You could play a premise like The Office, but make the characters an office full of spies![1] You can play super heroes, sci-fi soldiers, Medieval diplomats, pulp adventurers, school-age emo kids, or an emulation of The Beverly Hillbillies if you want. You could do a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ‘67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.[2] In fact you could even play a series about a group of Dark-Age adventurers who go around exploring dungeons, killing whatever monsters they find and stealing all their stuff. As long as it can be framed episodically and the in-play focus is on the characters and their issues, relationships, and QUESTIONS, anything is possible.

With PTA, setting all of these dials is up to everyone in the group, hammered out and determined collaboratively via a pitch session that is supposed to take place before the actual play of the ‘episodes’.

And that, my friends, is both PTA’s shimmering beauty and its potential spiked-pit death trap. In my experience, PTA works magnificently when a proactive, trusting, collaborative group of people gets together to pitch a premise that everyone buys into with gusto. But there’s the rub – everybody has to buy in, and the resulting premise should be fairly clear to everyone. If anyone doesn’t buy in, or has a different notion of what the premise actually is … then once play starts, things often seem to go wonky.

This isn’t just a danger with PTA, to be clear. It happens with other games where collaborative premise creation and/or shared narrative are the norms. Something along these lines seemed to happen in our Lady Blackbird game, too – in my opinion, anyway. And I’ll admit that I’ve heard this sort of complication being put forth as a reason to stick with more conventional “the GM brings most of the premise and commands the narrative” game styles. I get that, and if that’s good for you I’m great with it. For me, even with all the potential pitfalls and in spite of whatever problems I’m bringing up in this post, I remain committed to this type of play because when it works it is utterly wonderful and it works for me with more consistency than any of the alternatives I’ve tried.

So it is of value to me to write about it and try to unpack it a bit when things do go wonky. And the other night, our pitch session went wonky – which is preferable to a game going wonky after four or five sessions of play, but still, even in pitch, it can be frustrating.

First off, we play over Skype. There are inherent pros and cons to that, and I’ll point you to Daniel Perez’ well-written post about this topic for a good rundown of them. But in the end, the bottom line is that I want to play these types of games with this group of guys – and the only way it can work is through the Internet. So, Skype.

But yes, the lack of face-to-face contact complicates a pitch session. Remember, the essential elements (in my opinion) are mutual trust, buy-in and enthusiasm. Not seeing the faces and body language of everyone else can really screw with one’s ability to connect along those pathways. Knowing the people involved, knowing how they think, how they like to play, how you can ask questions in order to get them to clarify something without making them feel stepped on – all this helps mitigate the problem.

But if you don’t know each other well, or don’t have a good understanding of how someone thinks or how they like to play – it can kill the momentum before it even gets going. This can be further complicated when folks involved tends to be really passive and quiet on the Skype call, so you get no hint of what might be going on in their heads.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what we had the other night in spades. I for one could not get a read on whether other guys were digging any of the ideas that were being thrown out, or whether an idea was being presented seriously or just as a joke. I’m pretty sure sometimes the other guys were unsure of me, too. So we spent most of the night tossing stuff around, spitballing, and not grabbing onto anything.

Now comes the tricky part. I will probably come off like an asshat for singling someone out, but hopefully you’ll read this with grace and understand that I’m not placing blame, I’m simply saying ‘this is where it became most wonky for me’:

I don’t know Arnold very well. I have very little grasp of what Arnold sockets into in play, we have very little experience with which to be able to fill in unspoken gaps or comprehend each others’ shorthand. I know Chuck really well, and I feel like I almost always know where he’s coming from and/or where he’s going, or I know how to achieve clarity with him if I am unsure. I pretty much have the same thing with Rich. But Arnold remains an x-factor. And he is one of the quietest most passive guys I’ve encountered on a Skype call. So getting a read off of him is challenging. Again, this is an issue between us, NOT me saying anything is Arnold’s fault. He doesn’t have that grasp of me yet, either.

From my perspective, it felt like the night was full of a lot of spitballing that didn’t specifically go anywhere, but collectively, it began to add up to a roadmap of what kinds of issues we were eager to explore. Near the end of the night, we started down a path that – from my perspective – was really cooking for Chuck and Rich and I. It took a long time, lots of goofy and wonky ideas went by the wayside, and we also had lots of frustration with trying to get networked together with our online tabletop, MapTool. That is not the point of this, though, except in the sense that it was a contributor to the stink of FAIL that had crept over our efforts.

But in the end, we had a solid premise that 75% of us seemed clearly sold on. It contained aspects of ideas that all four of us had contributed, and it was different enough but still approachable enough to be fun.

The premise, FWIW, is this: In the late 1800’s, we would play members of a clan of Irish Travelers from the Eastern U.S. who go West in pursuit of an older member of the clan who broke away and was now going about the Old West doing some really bad things to various people in various towns – which has resulted in a curse being placed upon our clan. We would be a group of itinerant mummers/performers/actors (like the characters Billy Zane and Dana Delaney played in Tombstone) who would come into a town and perform but also seek out information about our wayward clan member – and even though we’re con artists and grifters, we end up using our shady skills to help people, ultimately in a quest to undo the damage our family member did and thus undo the curse.

So, like Leverage meets The Riches in the Old West. Rather unique, I think, but entirely plausible in terms of history and playability.

Okay, it had flaws, it was not much more than a draft, but it contained elements of the types of issues that we’d been tickling at all night, packaged in a genre and premise that Chuck and I were pretty excited about and Rich seemed to be bought into as well.

But Arnold felt out of the circle. He gave his assent, I recall, but – at least filtered through all the issues I’ve enumerated above – it was a hesitant assent.

Also, possibly, I’m not sure we had Rich as much as I thought we did. I’ll let Rich speak to that rather than doing further guessing.

We ended the evening agreeing to play with that premise – we would start thinking characters and then quickly pull those together at the beginning of the next session, then start the show. That’s where we left it when we finished the call.

The next day, though, as Rich and I traded some emails, Rich presented some good reasons why he wasn’t really sold on anything we’d pitched, including the Old West grifters thing, and in fact he was thinking maybe we should drop the PTA idea and play a different game altogether. I saw his point, and I was also pretty uncertain about whether Arnold was really plugged in, so I ended up agreeing with Rich even though I did – and still do – like the basic premise and I actually hope we take it up again sometime.

So that’s basically where we are. I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this, even after spending a good deal of my afternoon hacking away at writing it down.

I think we need to be intentional about coming up with some ways to communicate with one another more effectively in spite of Skype and in spite of the fact that not all of us know one another very well or understand one anothers’ styles/sockets yet. I think we need to do some sort of trust excercises like we used to do back in my theatre days. I feel fairly confident we can bridge these gaps – and it’s certainly worth it. So I’m hopeful.

Any thoughts or ideas, dear readers?

note: If you’d like to comment on this post, please jump over to the thread on Canon Puncture where I’ve cross-posted this entry. Thanks!

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[1] Thanks to Danielle Lewon for sharing this notion – and several other good ones – via Facebook.

[2] This was predominantly my idea and I HONESTLY like it – so sue me. The guys apparently thought I was joking or crazy. But seriously – if you’re out there thinking Shakespeare, Lincoln, and a goth-chick in a ‘67 Mustang would be a cool PTA show, let me know because I’m game if we can make it work schedule-wise and tech-wise.

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